A methodology for user directed search in evolutionary design

Abstract

A designer should be able to express their intentions with a design tool. This work describes a methodology that enables the architect to directly interact with the encoding of designs they find aesthetically pleasing. Broadening interaction beyond simple evaluation increases the amount of feedback and bias a user can apply to the search. Increased feedback will have the effect of directing the algorithm to more fruitful areas of the search space. We conduct trials on two interfaces for making localised changes to a design in order to evaluate if the user is capable of directing search. In addition, an examination of the locality of changes made by the users provides an insight into how they explore the search space. The results show that a suitably designed interface is capable of directing search and that the participants used different magnitudes of change during directed search.

Axial Generation: Mixing Colour and Shapes to Automatically Form Diverse Digital Sculptures

“…3D item generation does not have the same number of existing systems; however, there is still a diverse range of representations and methods being used. This includes manipulating the colour and visibility of voxels using CPPNs [22] or Context-Free Grammars [2,29,36], using Graph Grammars to generate a set of points in 3D space [30], using Shape Grammars to create 3D items [5,32,35] and evolving parameters to use within an external generation system [28,34]. Other non-direct generation methods have also been used, such as by taking 2D content and adding the extra dimension [18].…”